User blog comment:MochiMustache/DmC First Impressions, officially./@comment-5053772-20130225220628/@comment-134861-20130226050726

"The Castlevania Series is one of the foundation stones of hack and slash. DMC's architectural and creature designs also have a lot in common wit Castlevaina's. Lord's of Shadow can draw from a ton of it's own original sources."

I wasn't criticizing Castlevania, I was saying that DmC became more generic than the rest of the series.

"Dante Alighieri's Divinia Commedia is a hugeinfluence for Devil May Cry. Another game using that as a source does not make it bad. " No seriously, read what I said. I was pretty clear.

"Dante's personality is not even consitent throughout the series. He's more or less just muscles burbling some "gritty" one-liners. " Bull. Except for DMC2, which Capcom even remarked upon, he pretty much has the same personality throughout, slightly cockier in DMC3.

"For newer players it is more suitable, since nobody nowadays wants to sit down an learn all moves. Unless you're aiming for high rankings, your no gonna use many of them anyways. " And yet, DmC did not draw in as many new players as previous games like DMC4. Objectively, the "it's tweaked to be more inviting" is a failure, because DmC failed in that regard.

"My point is that a lot of criticism is really subjective." And yet mine was not. Quit it with the constant strawmen.

"The whole thing feels like a prequel to DMC. They basically set up a foundation for what looks like the classic series." It's an attempted prequel, certainly, that reads as if Ninja Theory watched a commercial about DMC in order to set up their "background story". As well as actual continuity goes, it's a mess. I'd honestly have to say, storywise, that they either weren't paying any attention to the original series when attempting to write a prequel, or that they had a totally different story, panicked, and tried to twist it into a prequel. A successful prequel it is not. It's like Highlander 2: The Quickening up in here.

"They did a good job at working out the differences between Danter and Vergil. One seems some rought and emotioal while the other is more defined and distanced." DMC3 already did exactly this, while not having quite such an obvious "twist" that still somehow came out of nowhere.

In summary: DmC is a game. It's an enjoyable game, I'm not gonna argue that, but it is certainly not a masterpiece, and it is objectively not among the top DMC games by any means, because it so distances itself from and dumbs down the defining qualities of the franchise. Honestly, I would put it next to DMC2 - it tried to do something "totally new and different", and just kind of...lacks that certain shine that other games in the series have.